


All The Problems Make Me Wanna Go

by Glaisne



Category: Parahumans Series - Wildbow
Genre: Gen, Heartbreaker is not a good dad, Past Rape/Non-con, This is kinda dark
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-06
Updated: 2020-05-06
Packaged: 2021-03-02 21:33:28
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,760
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24033583
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Glaisne/pseuds/Glaisne
Summary: There are things Alec never wanted the team to know about. That falls apart when a hacker releases a chunk of Heartbreaker's more private files.Semi inspired by a Tumblr post about how Alec's past was actually left kinda ambiguous and most of what we saw was Taylor's assumptions. Don't really agree with that, but I though the idea would be interesting to explore.
Relationships: Aisha Laborn & Alec | Regent
Comments: 2
Kudos: 51





	All The Problems Make Me Wanna Go

**Author's Note:**

> Trigger warning for past child sexual assault. It's not detailed, just referenced, but if discussion of this is something that will be difficult for you then please don't read this.

Taylor dropped her bag onto a chair and folded herself onto the couch with a cup of tea. She could hear Charlotte working with the kids in the other room. She flipped absentmindedly through channels until she found the news and leaned back into the cushions of the sofa. The local news was over, meaning that the next segment was probably going to be some celebrity puff piece. She sipped her tea. It was chamomile. 

The blonde woman on the screen smiled through an inane introduction and a photo of Nikos Vasil popped up in full color. 

Taylor set her tea down on a coaster. She had only ever seen Nikos Vasil in photos and videos, but she thought she would have been able to recognize him even if she hadn’t. He had the same pale blue eyes and dark hair that she saw everyday on her friend Alec.

Of course, they looked different. Nikos Vasil might have been handsome, tall and broad and muscular, but Alec was beautiful. Slender where his father was bulky. 

“This Saturday a hacker uncovered over two hundred videos and photos belonging to Nikos Vasil, also known as super villain Heartbreaker. Now, Conrad, what do you think those photos and videos contained?”

Her co-anchor shrugged, a politely baffled expression plastered to his generic face. “I’m not sure, Marie, but if it was Heartbreaker’s, I’m betting it was pretty disturbing.”

“Well you’re not wrong, there. The photos and videos were almost exclusively child pornography.”

Taylor’s stomach dropped unpleasantly. 

“God, that’s terrible, but is it really that far outside of Heartbreaker’s M.O?”

“That’s what I thought at first, until I learned that all of the victims were identified as Nikos Vasil’s own children.”

Taylor froze, prayed she had misheard. The news anchor kept talking. The words kept ringing in Taylor’s mind. She gulped down the rest of her tea before grabbing her phone from her bag and punching in Lisa’s number.

…

Lisa was reading when she got the call. It was a book Taylor had recommended, and she was still trying to get into it.

“Leaf Green,” she said as soon as she answered. She already knew who was calling. 

“Sun yellow,” said Taylor. “Turn on the news. Channel 182.”

Lisa frowned as she flipped to the right channel. 

The picture of a young boy looked back at her. Pretty blue eyes. Porcelain skin. Dark curls. Wine dark bruises. Half of the photo was blurred over, but Lisa could see where hands kept him pinned down. 

“Oh, god.”

…

“Hey,” said Aisha as she appeared in the corner of Alec’s room. She wasn’t in costume, a plain hoodie thrown over jeans standing in contrast to the look that usually only existed in Imp’s demonic features. 

Alec was staring at the wall. The TV was a black mirror, his tearstained reflection cracked and fractured from where the remote had left a crater indentation in it. 

“Hey.”

She sat down next to him, leaning her side against his. She wrapped an arm around his shoulders, squeezing her eyes shut as she tipped their foreheads together. 

“You okay?”

“No.”

His voice scared her. He didn’t sound sarcastic or angry. He didn’t sound like anything at all. He sounded like the indifferent void he had been when they first met. She would have to change that.

“What do you want to do?”

“I’ve only done heroin once, but I’m kinda feeling like a second go.”

Anyone else might have thought he was serious. But this was Alec, her Alec, and she knew by the way his eyebrows raised a little, by the way he said it too seriously…he was trying to be himself. She gave a watery laugh, pulling away to run her fingers through his hair.

“Not cocaine? Tasteless. Stay right here, I’ll get us fixed up. Actually, TV’s busted in here. Come with me.” 

She tugged him up by their interlaced fingers, gently leading him to where what he called a living room sat next to the kitchen. She guided him over to sit on the sofa before ducking into the kitchen. 

She was quick and generous in filling two bowls with ice cream before returning to the sofa. She breathed a silent sigh of relief to see him still where she had left him. The bowls clicked together when she set them on the end table before pulling him back into her arms. 

The familiarity of the Netflix logo had never been more comforting than when it came up instead of anything resembling news. 

“Kay, what are you feeling like?”

He gave her a look that clearly said ‘literally anything is fine.’

“Alright. How do you feel about a mystery documentary?”

“Sure.”

She grinned as she pulled up a show and felt him smiling against her shoulder at the intro.

“The mystery of our lifetime.” He said it in a deadpan, but it was the one he used when he was joking, so everything was closer to ok.

“Who drew the dicks?”

…

“What’s the emergency meeting for?” Brian frowned as he stepped into the sitting room of Lisa’s lair and only saw Taylor, Lisa, and Rachel. “Alec and Aisha are late, as usual. Should I call them?”

“No,” said Lisa a little too quickly. “We didn’t ask them to come.”

“Is that a good idea?” Taylor asked. “To leave him alone?”

“Aisha’s with him, she texted me,” explained Lisa. “Apparently, they’re watching American Vandal.”

“Has he seen the news?” Rachel was glowering at the floor. 

Lisa peered down at her phone again. “She didn’t say. But if they’re together, he’s fine. If he hasn’t seen it, we shouldn’t all tell him at once. If he has, he wouldn’t want to be crowded.”

“Sorry, what news?” Brian interjected, curiosity building with his frustration. His three teammates glanced at each other as though unsure of what to tell him. An awkward silence dragged. 

It was Lisa who finally broke it. “A bunch of Heartbreaker’s pornography got leaked by a hacker.”

Brian’s brows drew together in confusion. “What does that have to do with the team?”

Lisa grimaced. “A lot–most of it was of children. And Alec was…”

“Featured,” Taylor finished for her, something bitter in her dark eyes. 

Confusion turned to revulsion on Brian’s face. “Christ. So this is a vote?”

It was quiet for a moment before Rachel ground out a single “What?”

“I mean, I assume we’re voting on whether he’s off the team. Unless we’re going with a more drastic–FUCK!” Brian jolted up from the couch. “And he’s with Aisha?! I’m gonna fucking kill him if he so much as–”

An elbow in his gut stopped him in his tracks and sent him reeling back into the couch. Rachel was barring her teeth, jaw pushed forward in a savage threat. 

“Don’t,” it was more bark than word.

“I think you’ve misunderstood,” Taylor attempted diplomatically. 

“I don’t see how–”

“For fuck’s sake,” Lisa exclaimed, shoving her phone in front of his face. 

There was a picture brought up on her screen. It was clearly cropped and blurred, thank god, but there was no mistaking the facts. A familiar pale face, looking younger than Brian had ever imagined it being. Pale blue eyes, staring blankly into space. He looked–Brian had always thought he looked bored, but seeing this expression in this context made it seem like so much more than that. He looked dead inside. 

And the rest–Brian almost couldn’t bring himself to think about the rest. The dark of bruises along face and neck and wrists. The arms of a clearly older, fully grown man. Brian didn’t want to wonder who that was, if that was Heartbreaker, if that was some other man, if he was still alive, walking around with a smile on his face.

“Oh.” It was all he could say.

“Plus, he’s about the same age as Aisha, Brian.”

Lisa cleared her throat, putting her phone away. The image from it was burned into Brian’s eyes. “There were over two hundred photos and videos. Initially the hacker only sent cropped and blurred photos to news stations, but then the hacker got hacked. So now most of them have made their way onto other sites, unedited. At least forty three of them have Alec in them.”

“Will this be connected to him as Regent, though?” Taylor asked.

“It’s likely,” Lisa admitted. “No one has sifted through all of them yet, but people have already found quite a few where his siblings use their powers to try and avoid…it. There’s probably going to be a few instances of him using his powers. It will be obvious from there.”

“Then get rid of it,” Rachel demanded.

Lisa shook her head. “Even if I was the world’s best hacker, it’s already been in enough places that it’s been saved a dozen times over. All of it exists in the public now. Permanently.”

Brian pinched his brow. “Fuck. Fuck! Why wouldn’t he tell us about this?”

“I mean. You did assume he was the perpetrator,” Taylor pointed out, continuing when Brian opened his mouth to protest. “And to be honest, so did I. Not once I saw the pictures, but when we found out who is dad was. I assumed he was involved in all that stuff. And I guess he was, just not the way I thought.”

“He told me,” said Rachel. 

“When?”

“Really?”

Rachel nodded. “He mentioned it after we found out who his dad was. Said his dad used to do stuff. Said it like it was a joke, and it never came up again.”

Brian was frowning. “And you didn’t think to tell us?”

She shrugged. “It was his business.”

Lisa hummed thoughtfully. “If Rachel knew, then Aisha definitely knew. He only didn’t tell us three.”

“Why would he?” Rachel questioned. 

“Because we care,” Taylor stressed. “We would have done something.”

“You care,” Rachel agreed. “But he doesn’t know that.”

Brian sighed. “Okay. But what can we do to fix this?”

Lisa had a thoughtful look in her eyes as she turned to Taylor. “We can’t fix this, but we can do something. There’s something I should tell you about what happened to Shadow Stalker.”

…

Neon lights flashed past the bus windows. Taylor swayed slightly with the movement of the vehicle, staring straight ahead as she reached out for the cockroaches in the gutters, the spiders, every many-legged thing that would answer her call. They followed the bus. 

She kept one hand on her bag. She could feel the eyes of the other people on the bus. They knew who she was. Taylor Hebert. Skitter. 

The mass of insects following her grew as the hours stretched. Morning light began to filter between buildings as the sun began to rise. People got off the bus. People got on the bus. 

When Taylor got off the bus, it was full morning. Men in suits walked with coffee, eyes widening in recognition when they saw her. She walked down the street, letting her insects flow past her. She double checked the address Tattletale had given her. 

Her ants got to him first. 

Heartbreaker died at seven o’clock, with spiders in his lungs and maggots eating through his eyes. With wasps in his ears and bees in his mouth. With five bites from a black widow spider over his heart, and his genitals rotted off from brown recluse bites. With a scream and a Titan beetle on his lips.

Taylor Hebert was on her way back home by seven fifteen. 

…

The child on the screen was crying. He was crying, and Greg felt vaguely sick for watching this. But this wasn’t just watching a kid get hurt, it was also getting to see firsthand how emotion manipulation powers worked. 

“Don’t you want to enjoy this? I can make you enjoy this.”

Greg could see the hatred and panic building in the child’s pale eyes. And then–Greg squeezed his eyes shut. He couldn’t do this, he couldn’t watch this, this was bad. 

“Don’t touch me don’t touch me don’t touch me don’t touch me!”

The kid screamed. Greg’s eyes snapped open in time to see every muscle of the man’s body contort and bend backwards. He stared. So did the man, staggering backwards on legs that bent all the wrong ways. 

“Oh,” said the man. “Fascinating. Those powers will be useful. See, it was all worth it to trigger. I am so proud of you,” he reached out to touch the child’s face and his hand flexed backwards. He frowned. “Stop that. Love me.”

The child’s sobbing stopped as he looked up at the man. Greg waited for adulation to wash over his features. Instead, the child burst into laughter. 

The laughter was devastated and hollow and manic and it made Greg’s stomach hurt because the kid was still crying. 

“I don’t! I don’t love you, I don’t love you! I hate you I hate you I hate you!”

The man’s eyes widened in shock. The kid kept laughing. “It doesn’t work anymore! It doesn’t work anymore and I hate you so fucking much!”

“Love me–”

“Shut up!” 

The child shoved a hand forwards and the man’s jaw snapped shut so hard it might have cracked a tooth. The kid twisted their hand to the side, closing it into a fist, and Greg watched as the air was forced from the man’s lungs, as his own hand came to wrap around his throat. 

A woman entered the shot from the other side, a syringe plunging into the child’s skin before they could turn. The man wrenched his hand away as the child collapsed backwards. 

The video turned black. 

Greg logged onto parahumans.net

…

“I don’t believe it. He’s really dead.”

Jeff looked down at the body. It barely looked like a person, anymore. In all his years on the force, Jeff had never seen such a gruesome scene. But he couldn’t make himself feel sympathy. The tattoo on the body’s forearm was unmistakeable. All through the mansion the body had been found in, woman with empty eyes were snapping out of trances that had lasted years. Decades, for some of them. Emergency responders were wrapping blankets around the shoulders of woman and children, coaxing them away from the place they had been imprisoned. 

He wondered what would happen to them. A week ago, the children would have been treated like villains. But now–well, now they were just kids. Psychotic, murderous, badly hurt kids. 

“Well, believe it,” Jeff told his partner. “This guy is as dead as they get.”

…

“Now, I didn’t think anything could top the last news on Heartbreaker, but this story just keeps getting more complicated!” The news anchor smiled from the screen. Brian turned up the volume. 

“Run us through it, Marie,” Her co-anchor requested. 

“Well, Heartbreaker was found dead this morning. The killer? None other than the warlord Skitter.”

“Now, how can we be sure it was Skitter? She only operates in Brockton.”

“I know it sounds wild, Conrad, but there’s no doubt. Unless there’s someone else who could have killed a man with over ten thousand insect bites.”

Conrad whistled lowly. “Wow. Now, why would Skitter target Heartbreaker?”

“It seems to have been a response to the news of Mr. Vasil’s treatment of his children.”

“Is Miss Hebert very passionate about child abuse?”

“Well, maybe. But it’s not just that, as parahumans.net TinfoilHat84 revealed after going through the leaked footage. It seems Miss Hebert’s connection to this case is more personal. Let’s show the footage. Edited for decency, of course.”

The footage played. The footage played, and Brian felt sick. He couldn’t imagine his own trigger event playing out for all to see. It was too much. It was an invasion.

“Wow,” said Conrad. “Was that–”

“A trigger event,” Marie nodded. “Of Heartbreaker’s tenth child, Jean-Paul Vasil. Nine in this video, and first appearing as Hijack just months after. Young, but not by Heartbreaker’s standards. Now, I’m sure you’ve noticed the similarities between his powers and another villain’s.”

Conrad nodded. “A pretty prominent villain, at that.”

“Hijack vanished from Heartbreaker’s entourage at twelve. Our sources indicate that he ran away from home, taking on the mantle of Regent.”

“So this was revenge?”

“It sure seems like that.”

Brian clicked off the TV. He couldn’t bear to watch more. The speculation, the prying, the invasiveness of it all. He checked his phone. Taylor should be back in the city by now. It was time for another team meeting.


End file.
